Playwright: Tsehaye Geralyn Hebert
At: ETA Creative Arts Foundation,
7558 S. South Chicago
Phone: 773-752-3955; $25
Runs through: April 8
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Romanticist literary convention mandates that nature reflect the emotions of the hero. So when a character in Tsehaye Geralyn Hebert's Hardyesque story announces at the outset that a storm of hurricane proportions is brewing, we anticipate similar unease in the affairs of the Gremillion family at its center.
We are not disappointed. The struggle of Louisiana's bayou country farmers in 1919 to forge a livelihood would alone make for compelling drama, as would the experience of citizens only a generation removed from slavery searching for their identity in a fluctuating culture. Hebert's focus, however, is the toll exacted by social conditions on domestic harmony: Miriam and James Gremillion are devoted to one another, but the latter's job with the railroad keeps him away from home too long—a problem to spur even the most loving wife to an ultimatum. Meanwhile, Miriam's widowed mother mourns the husband she once sent away, never to return. But as the Gremillion children cower in fear of the marital and meteorological disturbances threatening their world, their grandmother comforts them with a fable featuring pére lapin and his familiar animal kinfolk, whose trials somehow conclude in everyone finding peace and contentment.
A fairy tale resolving the dramatic questions instead of initiating them is a strange way to structure a play, but a region renowned for its mystery tends to promote meandering yarns. Proceeding at the leisurely pace associated with the indigenous dialect, the various personae of our fable are introduced and their histories recounted in what might seem overly exhaustive detail. But if Hebert's narrative configurations are sometimes a bit too academic, her Creole phrases a bit too facile, her portrayal of innocence a bit too sentimentalized, once the plot begins to move, we are reminded of all the ways that these blameless people could end badly and hope for a reprieve, no matter how deus ex machinal.
Lending depth and humanity to the Victorian archetypes are Jeniel M. Smith as the wise clan matriarch, ably supported by Genn Jackson as the restless young matron, along with Kevin Hope and Will Davis as their devoted husbands—though look for the trio of Aaya Samadhi, JaMal Green and Angel Ruffin-Goodson to steal the show as the three little Gremillions, their irrepressible spirits undaunted even in the throes of the mighty tempest conjured by sound and light designers Keith Austin and Wallace Heard, Jr.